Rex Smith: More vital than a water main

My home is about a 20-minute drive from New York’s state Capitol. It’s in a comfortable suburban neighborhood with smooth, tree-shrounded streets.

So it surprises some of my urban friends to learn that our water comes from a well in the backyard and that beneath the front yard lies a septic field. When it comes to infrastructure, we’re country folk.

Yet here’s what we have that some people in the city don’t: Fast broadband Internet service.

Actually, I don’t care if the house is never hooked into the water main that runs down the big road a quarter-mile away, nor the more distant sewer system.

But my fast Internet connection? Don’t touch it. I need it.

From the kitchen counter, I can look at digital versions of this newspaper’s front page as it’s being built at night. My teenage daughter, working on homework in her bedroom, can get advice on solving a math problem as though her teacher is looking over her shoulder in the classroom. My wife does a live radio program airing nationwide from her study, getting real-time guidance on her laptop from a producer in Manhattan.

In this third decade of the Internet Age, it’s the way the world works. While not everybody takes full advantage of fast Internet service when it’s available, it has become a standard that we ought to consider as fundamental as the power that lights and heats our homes.

Yet there are many places in the United States, and right here in the Capital Region, where people are cut off from what some years ago came to be called the information superhighway. Perhaps 100 million housholds in this country are on a digital dirt road, and while a lot of those people have access to broadband at work, 18 million Americans have no broadband access at all.

It’s yet another point where America is falling behind. A decade ago, the U.S. was among the top five nations in broadband access. But other countries have invested more in expanding digital opportunities for their citizens, so America now ranks in the 20s, just above Macao.

This isn’t just about making it more convenient for people to work at home. Broadband Internet expands access to health care and education. It makes law enforcement more efficient and quick. It makes energy delivery faster and cheaper. It gives every family equal access to information, which is the currency of progress in our time.

This month the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates this sort of thing, put forward a plan to make high-speed digital service available to everyone. That would be done by transforming the fund that subsidizes basic telephone service in rural areas into one that would expand broadband instead.

You’re paying for that fund — to the tune of $8 billion a year — in fees for phone calls you make across state and national boundaries. Transferring that money to support broadband expansion will reduce subsidies for landlines, but phone companies ought to be able to get by without those dollars until we can do away with telephone poles altogether. Traditional phones will soon enough be as obsolete as black-and-white TV sets with rabbit ears.

I’m not forgetting that a lot of people believe subsidy of private industry with public dollars isn’t a good idea. Anytime an issue of this sort arises, there’s a lot of talk about private enterprise, based on the myth that our economy is a truly free-market system.

A closer look always reveals the subsidies that guide the economy’s shifts. Tax dollars for years have subsidized the growth of the suburbs at the expense of cities, by building roads and infrastructure that enabled people to live far from their jobs. Public money subsidizes the automobile industry and the energy industry, making us a mobile society that contributes more per capita to environmental degradation than any other nation.

And, more to the point, public money brought electricity to vast reaches of rural America, starting during the Great Depression. Rural electrification not only made life more comfortable on America’s farms and ranches, but also enabled economic growth in areas outside urban centers, transforming the face of the country and the nature of rural life.

Back to my neighborhood: Every few years, my neighbors and I are asked if we want to make the investment of several thousand dollars per household to bring public water to our homes. Speaking through our neighborhood association, we’ve politely declined. We’re fine with our wells.

But that fast Internet connection is another matter. You can’t dig that up in your backyard. And you can’t get it unless the rest of us pitch in. We should.

Rex Smith

3 Responses

Mmm. spoken like a true Liberal Demoncrat, using other peoples money to support and provide for those who did not pay for it, or paid little towards it…

I live in the Country too and currently our Water Authority is using our tax dollars to stretch pipe to large tracks of land owned by some Local Real Estate Companies and Investment Groups whose members names are very hard to track down and who are buddy buddy with the local Polticans who hope to build large groups of tract homes there in the future. When is anyone guess. But the installation of the Pipe will greatly enhance the value of the land, so I doubt very much the current owners will be the ones building the homes.

The $15 million for the pipe and creating additional storage space is comming out of the pockets of the current rate payers who are also enjoying a rate incrrease as well to come up with the money. The Real Estate Companies are paying NOTHING. In Theory the $15 million this is costing will be paid back by the new home owners while the Real Estate Companies get off scott free. But if that were true, then a rate decrease would also be forthcoming, but no rate reduction is planned for the current rate payers who are paying the bills…

So of course the Politicans who also man the Board are looking into the future see more tax money coming in and therefore as stated in their propaganda view it as an “investment” by the Water Authority but we the rate payers see it a bit differently and I can say for one, that I will not be voting for anyone on the water authority board come election time…

Not much difference between Washington and our Local Water Authority Board is there…..

[spoken like a true Liberal Demoncrat, using other peoples money to support and provide for those who did not pay for it, or paid little towards it…]

eddie, seems to me like what you describe above is exactly what Bernie Madoff, AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bros., etc., etc., right down to those “financial advisors” locally who bilked investors out of their life savings do. Or do you not read about financial fraud in the crime pages? Seems that none of them fit your definition of “liberal Democrat”. Nor do the fat cat real estate moguls you complain about.